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You can’t protect kids, but you can let them know you care: Days like these

If they don’t live at home, get in touch with them regularly, in person, over the phone or through social media sites.

Mornings used to be about drinking coffee and reading the paper, says Kathryn Laskaris. Now they're also about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and checking favourite websites. (Kathryn Laskaris / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Let’s start again. The point I’m trying to make is that Big Greek Husband has a desk, and it’s in the bedroom and that’s where he works. Get your mind out of the gutter.

I suppose working at home is the ideal goal in a time when the outside world seems to often be a place we only see in photos, tagging each other on Instagram or tweeting links to each other.

I have been known to email him a link when he is sitting next to me on the couch. When we still lived in our house, I admit that on occasion I would text the kids to tell them dinner was ready. (I have a little voice and it was a biggish house.)

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It hasn’t always been so, of course. Back in the early 90s, when I was just starting out in the newspapering business, I used to wake up in the morning and read the paper, drink my coffee and maybe watch the news.

Now I wake up, read the paper, drink my coffee, then grab my cellphone or my tablet and check my home email, my work email, look at who has said what on Twitter, who has liked what on Facebook and try to figure out which article on the Star’s website is getting the most clicks (probably the one about popular cat names).

As I write this, I am sitting in bed, and Big Greek Husband is six feet away, waiting until I leave the room so that he can switch his screen from a word document to Candy Crush. In an apartment of less than 800 square feet, it’s hard to have any secrets.

Of course, having no secrets seems to be pretty much the societal norm. The world knows more about what everyone had for dessert (#chocolate) than it ever has. There are thousands of pugs, for instance, who live out their lives on Instagram wearing little hand-knitted coats and bedazzled bow ties. One photo I came across recently, of a dog wearing a pink cowboy hat, had more than 27,000 likes. Some Blue Jays games don’t get that many people in attendance. The other day, I spent a good half-hour sucked into Pinterest, clicking through photos of wedding centre-pieces. It occurred to me that I am already married, but still, I kept clicking.

All this social media does, presumably, keep me informed. For instance, a few days ago, Katy Perry tweeted this: “Also we landed on a comet y’all.” I mean, how else would I have known that?

But I wonder, after scanning through a couple of studies (which I came across through, you know, Facebook), where will all this lead us? Is it making families better, or making them worse?

The first study, by Jennifer Schon out of the University of Kansas, has to do with parents of older children or “emerging adults.” It boils down to this: Whatever way you can increase communication with your children — texting, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter — is a good thing.

And while I mostly agree with this, I’ve also got a few doubts. With my own mother, for instance, I chat on the phone at least a couple of times a week, and go over to see her and my dad on the weekends. But I tend to only text the kids, not talk to them on the phone, and even then I don’t text them all that often. We do Skype the younger one, because he’s away at school, and the other day I hung out with the older one for a bit, drinking coffee and playing with his cat. (Side note: Have you ever taken a selfie with a cat? They don’t really like it.)

Still, it seems to me that I should be communicating with them more; my first instinct should be to pick up the phone and have a chat, not to just retweet their latest post. I’ll start working on that.

The other study, out of Centennial College, had to do with selfies, and the search for what is being called #instafame among the “hashtag generation.” It’s a disturbing study, concluding, among other things, that “parents are often unaware of their children’s online presence.”

This is a rabbit hole we have fallen down and may never completely climb out of. But I guess the trick, when you’re a parent, is the only trick that has ever worked: Pay attention to your kid. If they don’t live at home, get in touch with them regularly. Follow them on Twitter, friend them on Facebook, check them out on Instagram. You can’t protect them from everything; no parent ever could. But you can let them know you care enough to try.

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